It's a metaphor. Let me extend it a bit: Speech is the drought of repeated lies about the illegitimacy of an unwelcome outcome drying out the underbrush of widespread discontent.
Speech gathers the tinder of a crowd committed to "stop the steal".
Speech is the accelerant convincing those so predisposed that violence or the threat of violence is acceptable and even to be admired.
And speech is the match tossed offhandedly aiming the mob you primed and egged on at the target you want to intimidate (and that's the most charitable interpretation).
> you've placed the cause of this on algorithmic ranking as much as speech itself.
To be clear, I find algorithmic ranking to largely be the cause of mostly the 'widespread discontent based on repeated lies' part, although there are clearly also various 'automated radicalization' effects happening as well.
> Great, let's stop interfering with speech, it leads to bad things.
I don't think we get to unring that particular bell (especially since such ranking efforts predate both Twitter and Facebook). Applying ranking techniques to the prioritization and selection of a subset of items from a variety of sources is one of those ideas that was inevitable because it was obvious to a sufficiently large number of people, whether the result is a live feed, an automatically arranged 'front page', a playlist, or some other format. It doesn't even matter which specific techniques happened to be used, they were all going to be tried by a lot of folks until somebody got the results they wanted (more engagement / time on screen). Tech companies like Twitter and Facebook are going to continue to try to mitigate the toxic side effects on public discourse, but I don't think there is a way for them to back away from algorithmic ranking unless government regulation simply forbids it outright (which isn't too likely). For that matter, I'm not sure how useful HN itself would be if the front page wasn't being automatically ranked based on engagement+recency with editorial decisions being made to nuke certain types of posts/topics for being attractive nuisances.
